Recently, Telstar Logistics had an opportunity to take an authorized tour of the San Francisco Municipal Railway's Marin Division yard, thanks to our friends at Market Street Railway.
The Marin Division Yard is home to San Francisco's derelict streetcar storage facility — a kind of purgatory for old streetcars as they await either restoration or piecemeal destruction as parts-donors for the active streetcars in Muni's thriving vintage streetcar fleet.
Most of the old streetca…(more)

We took to the track last weekend. The automotive circus came to town, in the form of a 24 Hours of LeMons endurance race at Infinion Raceway just north of San Francisco. LeMons (Pro Tip: It's pronounced "lemons") is the nationwide auto racing series for crappy race cars that cost $500 or less. It's car racing for hackers, basically, in a spectacle of self-parody that's equal parts Burning Man, NASCAR, and Click and Clack.
Telstar Logistics participated as part of Bernal Dads Ra…(more)

San Francisco is preparing to order a handsome new "super-pumper" fireboat, and if The Big One ever strikes, the new boat is likely to play a starring role in saving the city from unspeakable destruction.
The salty dogs at gCaptain carry the details:
Seattle-based Jensen Maritime Consultants, Inc.announced today they have been chosen to design a custom “super pumper” fireboat for the City of San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD) that will enhance the departments marine fire fightin…(more)

While on a recent survey of the industrial waterfront in Oakland, California, Telstar Logistics spied a most unusual vehicle: A heavily armored backhoe strapped to an open-sided shipping container.
Moving in for a closer look, we observed that the vehicle was built in an unusual configuration, with four equally sized wheels on each corner. "It wants to go fast," we theorized.
Upon returning to headquarters, our reasearchers quickly identified the odd vehicle as a High Mobility Engineer …(more)

As you may have heard, Ford has ended production of the venerable Crown Victoria, the mainstay vehicle of American police and taxi fleets for decades.
The Crown Vic assembly line shut down last September, so we found ourselves wondering: What will replace the Crown Victoria in the California Highway Patrol's fleet? Hoping to find an answer, we dropped by the CHP's Fleet Operations facility in West Sacramento, California last weekend, hoping to see what the CHP has purchased now that the Cr…(more)

Since no one seems to want to take the thing, the US Navy has announced plans to scrap its Sea Shadow stealth warship prototype, which was built during the 1980s. Until recently the ship was in mothballs at Suisun Bay, near San Francisco, but its future now looks bleak:
Navy spokesman Chris Johnson told FoxNews.com the ship's fate is all but sealed: To the junk heap it will go.
"The next disposition is dismantling and recycling," he said.
Johnson said that from 2006 until this year,…(more)

This is geeky, but for San Franciscans or visiting tourists, it's also way cool. There is a new, live data feed available via San Francisco's NextBus and Market Street Railway that offers a realtime visualization of which vintage streetcars are operating on the F Line, and where exactly they are along the route.
The map is even animated, so it's basically like having a dashboard for San Francisco's vintage streetcar fleet. In fact, here's a photo of the new map in actual use ins…(more)

The Exbury Egg is a private retreat/artist’s studio, designed by architects PAD Studio in collaboration with the artist Stephen Turner. Turner spent a year living in the Egg, moored on the Beaulieu River. His thoughts and works were collected in a year-long online journal
…(more)

A collection of more Wes Anderson Analysis than you could ever possibly need, courtesy of film blog Every Frame a Painting / Piccadilly Circus, an illustration by Renzo Picasso from 1929. There’s a larger archive of Picasso’s work here. The relatively unknown designer sounds like an elaborately constructed character from an Anderson film / staying inter-war, the A.B.C. Murders is a point and click adventure game featuring Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (via RPS) / more graphi…(more)

A proper Barbapapa House (via Wowhaus). The French did this bubble architecture more efficiently and copiously than almost anyone else – Pierre Cardin’s classic ‘Bubble House‘ being a case in point / there is an Irish ferry based on Ulysses / at what point does whimsy become toxic? Ian Martin on London, a barbed and savage look back from a not-improbable future. Most modern architecture? Save it for the renders. Related, walking along the quasi-privatised River Thames. Al…(more)

A clutch of architectural links. Impington Village College in Campbridgeshire was created by Walter Gropius with Maxwell Fry, following the former’s exit from the Bauhaus and Germany and before he went on to ‘stardom’ in the US. It remains a curious amalgam of architectural influences and innovations. There’s an upcoming lecture day to celebrate the architect’s legacy in the UK, which also includes the private house in Old Church Street, Chelsea, marketed for £45M …(more)

Joining the dots. Since Marc Newson moved to Apple he has presumably had some input into the upcoming Apple Watch. Yet even more intriguing is the idea that he’s also involved in the rumoured Apple Car. After all, Newson’s Ford 021C of 1999 remains the quintessential example car-as-product-design, still fresh after 16 years.
Other things. The dawn of robot journalism / the bi-annual Nairn post gets an outing: The man who hated the transformation of Britain / vintage rock is a scann…(more)

Moonfire: The epic journey of Apollo 11 is an enhanced pictorial edit of Norman Mailer’s Time reportage on the moon programme. It seems that Mailer didn’t really enjoy the whole experience, feeling that it lacked a certain magic; he certainly didn’t go all out on the machismo and adventurous spirit conjured up by Wolfe in The Right Stuff (first chunk of movie version here). Taschen also produces a lunar rock edition, limited to just twelve copies. ‘Each book is contained…(more)

Interaction10 finally happened last weekend. I have barely blogged in a year. This is not a coincidence. A+B=C.
It’s hard to even know where to begin. Less than 100 hours ago, I completed the most significant accomplishment of my career (so far), a year-long project that filled all the nights and weekends outside my day job. Words fail. Holy crap, I just co-chaired a conference.
Interaction10 rocked. Our amazing team pulled off a 4 day event with over 500 people, 11 workshops, 40+ session…(more)

Happy to announce that I’ll be giving a virtual seminar for UIE on the topic of Designing Humanity Into Your Products on September 9. For more info, check out UIE.
Please sign up and listen in! And hey, want a discount? Use my discount code BILLDER to save yourself some hard-earned cash. See you there.…(more)

Experimenting with video…
Here’s a mini-diatribe on how simple phrasings in an interaction can confuse the interaction. Or, yet another fun example of pointing out silly technology. In this case, paying for airport parking and turning in your receipt so you can leave the parking area, and questioning what the machine says.
Plus, you can see how much my eyes wander while I’m driving. Safety first!
…(more)

Earlier I in June, I was fortunate to be speaking at From Business to Buttons 09. It was a great event, hosted at Malmo University in Sweden. We got to see a lot of insightful student presentations as well as some great talks put on by the various speakers, include Garr Reynolds, Scott Berkun, Matt Jones and Dave Malouf.
Here is the video from my talk, Designing Humanity into Your Products.
I switched gears a bit from talking about buttons. I focused instead on words, writing and voice. How pro…(more)

In February 2009, I’ll be heading up to Vancouver BC to attend Interaction’09, the annual conference organized by IxDA, the Interaction Design Association. I couldn’t be more excited. Why?
This is my tribe of people. Some call themselves interaction designers, some call themselves information architects, some have other variations. But really, they’re all intelligent, curious, kind people with a fascination for how people interact with technology, and improving it in thei…(more)

Last weekend, I attended and spoke at CyborgCamp. It was a helluva thing. It’s incredibly energizing to get a bunch of smart and thoughtful people in a room together for a day to talk about the intertwinement between people and technology. Ward Cunningham was a joy to watch and see how he visualizes massive data. Lia Hollander spoke passionately about her bond with her insulin pump. And I could watch Hideshi Hamaguchi diagram on a whiteboard all day long. The biggest thanks of all go to Am…(more)

BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a 40 minute audio documentary on The Human Button, (today Dec 2) including interviews with the people who would’ve lived in the underground bunker, running the British government in the event of a nuclear war.
There is also a great audio slideshow of the discarded bunker, showing the rooms and dead technology from this forgotten era, and thankfully, never used.
Hopefully we can see/hear more programs like this to show the incredible amount of money wasted on te…(more)

Recently, I played pinball and went bowling in the same week. The two games will always be linked together for me because that’s where I first really experienced interaction design: the bowling alley.
I enjoy saying that I grew up in a bowling alley. There’s tiny me camping under stinky shoes, scrounging stale nachos for dinner, and sniping smokes from the ‘dults. But in truth, from roughly the ages 7 to 13, my mom, aunt and uncle were all in bowling leagues, so I went once or…(more)

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